First of all, you should and legally have to talk to your doctor before getting Adderall.

Adderall, Ritalin, and similar medications are Schedule II drugs, which have medical uses but also have a high potential for abuse that can potentially lead to dependence — they should only be taken after a consultation with a doctor.

They are generally prescribed to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. The way your body responds to the drug may depend on whether you actually have ADHD, according to some research.

To make that diagnosis, your doctor or mental health provider will ask questions to see whether you have six or more of the 18 ADHD symptoms listed in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) — they may check for just five symptoms for people of certain ages. A doctor who decides that those symptoms aren't caused by something else may prescribe a stimulant like Adderall to see whether that helps.

If you're considering a prescription, there are still at least 23 things you should consider before taking a powerful drug like Adderall or Ritalin.

If you like the feeling of Adderall or Ritalin, you may be less likely to have ADHD.

The number of adults who have an ADHD prescription is now rising much faster than the number of children getting the same drugs. In the case of adults, a lot of that rapid growth is driven by women who are getting a prescription for adult ADHD.

Stimulants might provide some cognitive enhancement in people with adult ADHD.

Among adults, a study showed that ADHD subjects who regularly took medication performed better on an IQ test than ADHD adults who were unmedicated.

Researchers say their higher scores could mean that their medication helped them do better on the test, or it could mean that the adults who would have done better on the test anyway were the same ones who would have sought out treatment.

... and there's some evidence that they can boost working memory, but only very slightly.

A review of different studies on the cognitive benefits or harms of stimulants found limited effects on working memory, the ability to hold and manipulate different pieces of information simultaneously.

That's not very significant for most people but may provide "a small advantage" in certain situations.

Another review found that people who performed poorly on tests to begin with saw the most improved performance, leading researchers to think that stimulants may be better at correcting deficits than at enhancing cognitive abilities.

The placebo effect may account for some of the perceived cognitive benefits of Ritalin.

Scary side effects include heart attacks and sudden death.

The scariest of the listed side effects for Adderall is the risk of sudden death, along with a series of other heart problems that stimulants can cause.

Most of the sudden-death cases, which are rare, have occurred with people who had structural issues with their heart or other health complications, and at least one fatality involved a toxic level of medication. Another case was associated with vigorous exercise.

Every major ADHD drug has been cited by the FDA for false and misleading advertising.

CIBA

According to The New York Times, the FDA has "cited every major ADHD drug — stimulants like Adderall, Concerta, Focalin, and Vyvanse, and nonstimulants like Intuniv and Strattera — for false and misleading advertising since 2000, some multiple times."

That story quotes experts who argue that marketing — and, in some cases, false marketing — by pharmaceutical companies is behind much of the rise in the number of people taking Adderall, Vyvanse, Concerta, and Focalin.

They note that sales of stimulants have quintupled since 2002 and point to potentially misleading quizzes that let adults test whether they have ADHD. The Times polled more than 1,100 adults and found that more than half scored in a range that said they "possibly" or "likely" suffer from ADHD, suggesting the criteria are far too inclusive.

In rare cases, stimulant abuse has led to mental illness and psychosis.

The FDA's medication guide to Adderall warns people to call doctors immediately if they experience mental problems, "especially seeing or hearing things that are not real, believing things that are not real, or are suspicious."

Worsened mental illness for adults and psychotic symptoms for children are among the listed side effects.

The medical literature includes case reports of methylphenidate, the active ingredient in Ritalin and Concerta, triggering depression in a 7-year-old and terrifying hallucinations in a 15-year-old. And The New York Times reported on the highly unusual but tragic case of Richard Fee, a 24-year-old from Virginia Beach. Fee developed very serious mental-health problems while battling a severe addiction to prescription stimulants and ultimately took his own life.

Almost 20% of high school boys have received a diagnosis of ADHD, and more kids are prescribed stimulants than ever before.

A 2013 CDC report showed that the number of kids ages 4 to 17 who received a diagnosis of ADHD rose 41% over the past decade. About two-thirds of kids with a diagnosis are prescribed stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin.

Boys receive ADHD diagnoses at more than twice the rate of girls and are also more likely to receive prescription stimulants. Almost 20% of high school boys have received an ADHD diagnosis.

Some people argue that this reflects better recognition and diagnosis of ADHD, but others say that it's a dangerous overuse of medicine to calm kids down and help them out in school. A big feature in Esquire argues that the high rate of ADHD diagnoses among boys in particular is due to both a misunderstanding of boys' behavior and increased marketing efforts by pharmaceutical companies.

Many people who use Adderall without a prescription don't think they are taking a drug.

Up to one-third of college students use stimulants — and they don't think it's cheating.

While it's hard to estimate illegal or off-label usage of prescription stimulants, one recent study showed that almost 20% of Ivy League students used an unprescribed study aid at least once while in college.

Of the Ivy League students surveyed, 33% did not view using stimulants as cheating, though 41% did. The remaining 25% were unsure.

Because students don't consider Adderall use a big deal, they talk about it freely on social media — giving researchers plenty of data to analyze.

Twitter

People aren't scared to mention on Twitter that they are using Adderall, and though there are questions about how reliable behavioral information gathered from Twitter is, data scientists are taking note.

Computer science researchers at Brigham Young University analyzed tweets that mentioned "Adderall" between November 2011 and May 2012. There were an average of 930 Adderall-related tweets a day, but that number rose to 2,813 on Dec. 13 and 2,207 on April 30 — a spike the researchers attributed to finals cramming.

And geotagging revealed where people were tweeting about Adderall most: The largest clusters of tweets about Adderall per 100,000 students were near universities in the Northeast and South, a finding that matches previous research on where students are most likely to use "study aids."

On less public apps like Yeti, which Business Insider's Julie Bort explains "is an app where students share photos and videos of college life," students are perhaps even more open about stimulant use.

The typical college student who uses Adderall without a prescription is white, male, and in a fraternity.

Pro baseball players take ADHD meds at rates that are much higher than normal.

After Major League Baseball announced a stimulant ban, at about the same time regulators were cracking down on steroid abuse, the number of pro baseball players who requested therapeutic exemptions that would allow them to continue to take stimulants jumped from 28 players to 103, or 8% of the league. The number is now even higher: In 2013, 119 requested those exemptions.

Those rates are more than double the 4% of adults who the National Institute of Mental Health says are affected by ADHD. Some say that professional athletes are more likely to have ADHD than the rest of the population, but not everyone agrees.

"This is incredible. This is quite spectacular," said Dr. Gary Wadler of the World Anti-Doping Agency, when the MLB ban led to a jump in therapeutic exemptions. "There seems to be an epidemic of ADD in major league baseball."